Pi in the Sky Read online

  “I really need to go,” she says, blinking fast. “This is the LONGEST dream, and I’ve got to wake up. I don’t want to sleep the night away and miss the whole Mars approach. Well, I do want to miss it, but it’s important to my dad, so…” She starts pinching her arm again. Then she squeezes her eyes closed and open, closed and open. She takes a big gulp of air (we don’t have oxygen here, which begs the question of how she can breathe), holds it, then lets it out. “Ugh,” she says. “I’m still here.”

  My father taps his large foot impatiently.

  I repeat my previous question. “So, um, how did you get here again?”

  “Honestly,” she says, “I don’t really remember falling asleep. One minute I’m looking through Dad’s scope at the sky where, as usual, nothing is happening, and then I must have fallen asleep because suddenly I see this old lady with flour on her face, pulling a pie out of an oven.” She pauses. “I think it was apple.”

  “And then you were here, in my father’s office?”

  She nods. “Pretty much. That dream faded into dark and then this one started. You know how dreams are.”

  I don’t, actually, since we don’t dream here. We don’t sleep much, either, maybe once every few months. But I nod politely.

  She looks around again, clearly trying to make sense of her surroundings. I try to see PTB headquarters through her eyes, with her limited senses. Like the rest of the universe, The Realms are made of concentrated energy disguised as matter. But in the rest of the universe, all the matter—all the stuff—is made of tiny dancing particles inside only slightly larger atoms. And except for hydrogen, almost all those atoms, including the ones that make up her own body, were forged inside exploding stars. Here in The Realms, those tiny particles aren’t so tiny. Humans are made of trillions and trillions of atoms, of all different elements. We are made of only a hundred atoms and only primordial elements, the ones that were here at the very beginning of space and time, the ones that no other beings in the universe can see. We are more gas than solid, more energy than matter. Our surroundings shimmer and glow, vibrate and pulse. Sounds weird, but you get used to it.

  As for the people, the inhabitants of The Realms mostly look like the kind of people she’s used to. We have brains and hearts and skin like most of the species in the universe, but we are very different from them. Basically, we are only a bit denser than our surroundings. Like a liquid on Earth, we can mold ourselves to fit any container. Last century it was very trendy to take the shape of Blopies, the purple blobs from a planet with a really weak gravitational force in the Whirlpool Galaxy. The Blopie craze died out when people missed having hands.

  I’m suddenly not sure how much I’m supposed to say to this girl, this living, breathing human. Do I tell her she’s in The Realms, and that this isn’t a dream? Do I explain that the PTB made it so her entire solar system never actually existed? All because of her? I want to ask about Kal, but it’s all too much to process. I glance at Dad for help.

  “Permit me to explain,” he says, stepping closer to us. The girl flinches but holds her ground.

  “I am Joss’s father, and you could say I run this place.”

  No longer hindered by her huge coat, Annika crosses her arms successfully this time. “No disrespect, mister, but you don’t run my dream.”

  A flash of anger crosses my father’s face, but it is gone so quickly that her senses wouldn’t have noticed even a flicker in his expression.

  “You are right, of course,” he says. “I will defer to your nocturnal flights of fancy.”

  “Good,” she says. “Whatever that means. Well, since this dream won’t seem to go away on its own, I’m gonna curl up and ignore it till it does. So… see ya.” She takes her coat from my hands, drops it to the floor, then lies down on top of it and closes her eyes. Instantly, gentle snores fill the cavernous room.

  Dad and I share a surprised glance. The PTB grumble angrily. Really, no inhabitant of The Realms would EVER treat my dad this way. But Dad motions all of us to the other side of the room.

  “Let her be for now,” he says. “Joss, you wait here until she’s ready to talk again.”

  The PTB hurry out, probably glad to be released of any responsibility for the strange girl. Gluck the Yuck is the only one who stays with us.

  “Dad, you promised to get Kal back.”

  He glances at Gluck before answering. “It’s not that easy.”

  “You’ve been saying that a lot today. Everything’s easy for you. You’re the Supreme Overlord of the Universe!”

  “True,” he admits. “But I still have to abide by the same fundamental laws of nature as everyone else.”

  Gluck puts his hand on my arm. “Listen, Joss. What happened to Kal is very straightforward. As the arrow of time sped backward, his parents got younger and younger. As the billions of years wound down, and the last of their essence was lost, Kal was lost, too.”

  I turn to Dad for verification of this. He nods. “I’m sorry, son, but look on the bright side. Kal doesn’t know he’s gone, so he’s not suffering.” He gestures over to the sleeping girl. “And now you have a new companion. She seems… nice.”

  “And she has a lot of spunk,” adds Gluck.

  I know they’re just trying to be helpful, but do they really think Kal, who was supposed to be my sidekick for the rest of eternity, can be replaced by a strange girl from a terrestrial planet who hates red parkas and will live no longer than a few billion heartbeats? I shake my head. “Gluck has pimples that have longer life spans than her.”

  “Now that’s just rude,” Dad scolds.

  “I’ll let it go,” Gluck says, “since you’re obviously upset.”

  “How can she even BE here?” I ask. “We don’t have an atmosphere like Earth’s at all. No oxygen or sunlight or any of the things she needs to live.”

  Dad shrugs. “And yet she lives.”

  “For now, anyway,” Gluck adds.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You saw how easily she fell asleep.”

  “So?”

  “Never mind that now,” my father says. “We have more important things to worry about than her sleeping habits. We have a living human in The Realms for the first time in the history of the universe. This is exactly why the consequences for viewing The Realms are so swift and dire. Anomalies like this.” He grimaces, but I wonder if it’s heartfelt. My father enjoys a good mystery too much not to be enjoying this at least to some degree.

  My thoughts are swirling. Kal is gone. Annika is here. And then it hits me. “But Dad! If Annika is the one who saw Aunt Rae, and she’s stuck here in The Realms, then she can’t tell anyone about us. That means you can bring back her planet without having to worry about upsetting the natural order of things, or whatever you said before. And then Kal and his parents will come back!”

  Dad grips my shoulder. “Joss, I cannot bring her planet back. It does not exist anymore. You must accept it. Kal will always be alive in your memories.”

  I cringe at his words. I can’t accept it, no matter what he says. I have no experience with losing anyone. Immortality in The Realms can be incredibly, mind-numbingly, chew-your-own-foot-off boring, but on the plus side, no death. Except now, apparently, with a chain of events that started with some girl looking in the wrong spot at the wrong time and ended with my best friend going poof, never to be seen again.

  I shake my head. “There must be something—”

  “She’s waking up,” Dad says, cutting me off. “Go over there and convince her this is still a dream.”

  But I don’t move. I don’t want to talk to the girl ever again. All of this—ALL OF IT—is her fault. I’ve never ignored a direct order from my father before, but I just can’t do it. I dig my heels into the floor. Literally, I push them in a few inches.

  Dad scowls. “You don’t have a choice, Joss. If she figures out where she is, who knows what the cosmic consequences would be. At the very least she can’t know what happen